Toes officially icicles, legs covered in scratchy goose bumps, she felt the shiver she’d been fighting off since leaving the warm confines of her bed finally shake through her. Steve said he was going to be in Staltsman all day tomorrow. There wasn’t any fountain in Staltsman. There was a fountain in Broadlands Park. It’d been lying dormant all winter and would be resurrected in a matter of weeks. That had to be where Steve was meeting the mystery woman. Even if he didn’t show up, even if the time and place had somehow gotten mixed up, Amelia couldn’t see the harm in happening to be in that park at noon tomorrow.
Maybe Suze was a blue-haired, wrinkly ninety-year-old. Maybe she was someone from the Village office, and they were having a work lunch. Maybe . . . Amelia shook her head and wrapped her arms around her midsection. Like Ellie always said—too many maybes. As she headed back up the stairs with the permit tucked into a manila envelope in her hand, she flicked off the lights she’d turned on just half an hour earlier. Nothing had changed really, but somehow, when she slipped under the covers after placing the folder on top of Steve’s dresser, Amelia couldn’t bring herself to press her feet against her husband’s legs for warmth.
CHAPTER 9
ELLIE
Tuesday, May 10
11:04 a.m.
Ellie ran beside her sister as they pushed her across the gravel drive. The wheels of the gurney kicked up rocks that stung Ellie’s skin through her uniform. Another two ambulances had shown up from neighboring towns. The one they were hefting Amelia into was driven by Patty McDaniels and her partner, Cam Baxi. They’d work hard to save Amelia.
Ellie held the IV bag in her hands, feeling like she was doing something at least. She knew they weren’t going to let her in the rig. No way. Amelia was too critical. Plus, when Chet showed up in the office with a stretcher and kit, he looked at her like she was the patient. He glanced at her ripped shirt, bruised cheek, the wildness she was sure lit her eyes up like a trapped animal, and then the dead man on the floor. She could see him assessing her mental state. They’d been partners for only six months, but even after a short stint, she could still predict with scary accuracy what Chet was thinking behind his fluffy eyebrows and overgrown mustache. But she didn’t want him to assess her, to help her. She wanted him to use those years and years of experience to find a way to save Amelia.
He’d been watching her cautiously ever since as though she’d collapse into his arms as soon as Amelia was on her way to the hospital. Ellie couldn’t really count that out. Collapsing felt like a very viable option right now.
Still rushing to keep up, Ellie filled Cam and Patty in on everything—the injuries, the bullet wounds, the shallow breathing, the slow pulse. She told them about what she’d done to treat each item and stabilize Amelia till they could get her out. The words came out professionally and calculated, like this was a stranger, just any other patient. She’d turned “little sister” off inside the house, but now, hearing the cold edge to her voice, she wanted those feelings back. She wanted to be the family member who sobbed after the ambulance doors shut. Who begged the paramedics to save her life. The human connection that made you, as a paramedic, work just that fraction harder.
As Patty reached up under the end of the stretcher to collapse the wheels, Ellie called out.
“Wait!” Both Cam and Patty froze in place, giving her the same look that Chet couldn’t seem to get off his face. “One second.” She held up a bloody, gloved finger. “Just give me one.”
Patty took her hand off the latch and stepped back a fraction of an inch. Cam shifted from one foot to the other, clearly willing to be patient for a second but not much longer than that. Later, she’d be embarrassed. Later, she’d care. Right now she needed to say good-bye to her sister—just in case.
Her feet shuffled audibly through the gravel drive till she was just above Amelia’s head. She kissed her forehead, that special spot that their father always claimed as his own. When Ellie’s lips touched Amelia’s clammy skin, the walls she’d hastily built just twenty minutes earlier collapsed in one agonizing crash. Her breath rushed out in a wave like when she’d fallen off the top of the slide in fifth grade and had felt like she’d never breathe again.
“Brown, we have to go.” Cam was firm, but there was a touch of pity in his voice that would haunt her once the fuzzy blur of panic washed away. Ellie stood up reluctantly and placed the IV bag on Amelia’s chest. “We’ll take good care of her. I swear,” he continued, and though she’d said those same encouraging words a hundred times before, she actually believed him.
As they rolled Amelia into the back of the rig, Chet walked up beside her and put his heavy, comforting arm around her shoulder. For a moment, as the red-and-white lights bounced around inside her eyes, nearly blinding her, and the sirens rang through her ears, she let herself pretend that it wasn’t Chet by her side but her father and that he was going to make everything okay.
“Hey, come on. Let’s check you out. Then we can follow them. Okay?”
“Check me out?” Ellie broke out of her trance and focused in on Chet’s face. She shrugged his arm off from around her shoulder, wiping at her cheeks with her sleeve, determined to remove any evidence of tears before she had to face the officers and questions, the hospital, the doctors, and her father. “I’m fine. Get in the rig.”
She pulled at her bloody gloves. They made a slurping sound as she ripped them off her sweaty hands. Chet took the soiled gloves and shoved them into the biohazard container inside one of the kits before adding his own and hefting it back onto his shoulder. Ellie didn’t notice his heavy load, too distracted by the refreshing whiteness of her skin, like she was cleaning away the horror of what had happened so far that day.
But her hands weren’t the only things covered in Amelia’s blood. The front of her dark blue shirt was growing stiff with the thick crimson fluid, and two nearly black ovals were hardening on her knees. She tried to think back to when it could’ve gotten there. Maybe when she moved Amelia’s body across the floor, or knelt by her side, or crawled around her still body to insert the IV. She wasn’t positive how it got there; she only knew that it was unbearable to walk around wearing her sister’s blood.
As Chet urged her down the curving drive toward their rig, somehow carrying all three kits and keeping her in a forward momentum, Ellie ripped the shirt off her body as though it was made of fiberglass, invisible fragments digging deeper into her skin. In just her white tank top, she balled the discarded shirt up in her hands, squeezing so hard that she hoped the fabric would just disappear.
Chet ushered her to the passenger seat. Once she settled into the familiar chair, Ellie took a deep breath. She had to phase out of “freak-out-zombie” mode fast if they were going to make it to the hospital any time soon. Chet wasn’t going to let her out of his sight until he was certain she wasn’t in shock.